The statements in this section merely provide background information related to the present disclosure and may not constitute prior art.
Consumers may purchase goods or services through a variety of channels, including shopping in stores, by phones or via the Internet. The consumers may swipe their cards at merchant's point of sale (POS) devices in the stores, make a payment upon delivery, or provide credit card numbers or bank card numbers for order by phone or over the Internet.
For the payment upon delivery situations, the merchants need to provide a lot of POS devices for couriers to allow the consumers to swipe their cards to make a payment, thereby increasing merchants' business costs. For online payment situations, the merchants may communicate with the consumers through an open platform such as WeChat (also known as “Weixin”). A merchant needs to have an account on the open platform and develop a series of interface protocols in order to communicate with the open platform, which processes the payment. For authentication purposes, the merchant also need to have its own website and backend server to store the authentication key provided by the open platform. The above-described online payment method is cost-prohibitive for small and mid-sized merchants due to lack of resources to develop their own websites and the required interface protocols to communicate with the open platform.
Moreover, regardless of the type of purchases and the methods of payment, the consumers generally need to have their bank cards or credit cards in hand to make a payment. Carrying multiple credit cards and/or bank cards during shopping or dining increases the risk of identity theft when the consumers lose their wallets.